Here's What Space Photographs Look Like Before They're Altered

Gorgeous space pictures don't start that way.

In NASA's iconic images of nebulas such as the Crab and the Eagle, bright greens, reds, and purples swirl in a fuzzy cloud of cosmic psychedelia. These images are, of course, a lie. But a new image of the Helix Nebula provides a fascinating look at how these stunning pictures come together.

The La Silla Observatory, located way out in Chile's Atacama Desert, captured this collection of raw images—a different detector captured each of the eight frames. It's beautiful in a rustic, minimalist kind of way.

Ordinarily, the agency that created the image (the European Southern Observatory in this case) would fill in the gaps between the frames using images shot from different vantage points, New Scientist says. Later, these images get their hues when the original is combined with images shot through colored filters. When you see the brilliant final product, those colors reveal the chemical makeup of the nebula, as each color represents a different gas.

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